Excerpt from Novel: War In A Beautiful Country

“I am no longer beautiful,” she said to Roscoe.
Doris could see it in her face: the door closing; slowly swinging shut, and like in a dream she was helpless to stop it. Certain things were now irretrievable, and they just would never happen to her again.
“So I guess I’ll have to be nice instead. After all, now even my old lovers are old.”
She was hoping for a laugh. Or at least, forgiveness.
Roscoe smiled, but did not reply. He was not in the mood for Doris’ thrashing against the crushing inevitability of what faced them both. He often thought: When I was young, the life of the old was meaningless to me. Why does it take us by surprise, since we see it happen everywhere. When we were young we told ourselves we would refuse to be old, thought that the old were old because they didn’t refuse, that they went like lambs to the slaughter, that growing old was an outside force they could defend themselves against and didn’t. When, then, do we become surprised that we can’t refuse…..?
Neither of them was able to refuse. This was one of the few things left to them in which they could find comfort and understanding in each other.
“I knew you when you had hair,” Doris often told Roscoe.
He was glad to have someone else who carried his history within. He felt this expanded him, amplified him. Might help to reconstruct him. For so long, you think it’s your world then suddenly find you’ve been bumped into the wings and can’t get back onstage.
Hope would heal them if they could retrieve it.
But it was hopeless: teenagers die of loneliness before they find it; the old after they lose it.